zompist bboard

In India, a new language part of the Tibeto-Burman family has been discovered. It appearently has only 800-1200 speakers, and it is "vulnerable".

[url=http://www.nationalgeographic.com/field/explorers/david-harrison/]Dr David Harrison[/url], 'one of the expedition leaders' wrote:We didn't have to get far on our word list to realise it was extremely different in every possible way

Now I call bullshit on that. It sounds like the Dr wants to exaggerate the importance of the find, or something. It could of course also be the BBC's reporting, which is always bad on stuff like this, and even use a photograph on top of the article that insinuates these are speakers of the language, while the photo comes appearently from the Dr himself, from a talk in 2008 (see link above).

Blah, I hate stuff like this.


JAL

Different in every way, you say? Do they communicate achronologically via EM waves in the microwave region? Are they spirally-polarized? Does the mechanism utilize all 4/10/11/26 dimensions? DO THEY HAVE RETROFLEX IMPLOSIVES???

Science reporting on the BBC is infamously bad, and in journalism everywhere it is a common practice to rewrite quotes to say what the reporter wants them to say, to a degree most good-faith-assuming Americans, at least, would find shocking. I give it more than even odds Dr. Harrison is at least as upset about that quote as you are.

Even if he did say "extremely different in every possible way", it doesn't take that much goodwill to interpret it as "obviously different enough (from whatever it's most closely related to) to be a distinct language".

Radius Solis wrote:I give it more than even odds Dr. Harrison is at least as upset about that quote as you are.

We'll see. I sent him an e-mail.


JAL

I'm glad I saw this thread, I was just about to make one of my own.

What I call bs on is this:

When languages die, they take with them a vast amount of human knowledge, Harrison says, from how to make medicines out of plants, how to survive in harsh environments, and creation myths and personal histories.

jal wrote:

Radius Solis wrote:I give it more than even odds Dr. Harrison is at least as upset about that quote as you are.

We'll see. I sent him an e-mail.


JAL

Awesome, please let us know if you get a response. Though I imagine the guy must be getting quite a lot of email right about now.

Qang wrote:What I call bs on is this:

When languages die, they take with them a vast amount of human knowledge, Harrison says, from how to make medicines out of plants, how to survive in harsh environments, and creation myths and personal histories.

It's an exaggeration if you read it to say that every language extinction involves the loss of all of those things, but surely it's true to say that some, perhaps many, language extinctions involve or are related to the loss of one or more of those things?

jimhenry wrote:It's an exaggeration if you read it to say that every language extinction involves the loss of all of those things, but surely it's true to say that some, perhaps many, language extinctions involve or are related to the loss of one or more of those things?

I see it more as a conflation of the ideas of "knowledge" and 'unique lexica and grammar'.

Qang wrote:

jimhenry wrote:It's an exaggeration if you read it to say that every language extinction involves the loss of all of those things, but surely it's true to say that some, perhaps many, language extinctions involve or are related to the loss of one or more of those things?

I see it more as a conflation of the ideas of "knowledge" and 'unique lexica and grammar'.

Yeah but... sociolinguistics.

weldingfish wrote:Yeah but... sociolinguistics.

Well, yeah. However, I would ask what the definition of "dead" is in this context. Are we talking about a language that has little to no record of its history, or are we talking about a language that has been studied and codified but simply isn't spoken anymore?

I think the difference is notable.

Well okay, say we have a language that has been more-or-less well described by linguists. And say that the whole corpus of traditional knowledge (medicinal, religious, cultural, etc) has been adequately recorded and translated into x lingua franca, and then the language just dies out, even ceremonial contexts, being replaced by x lingua franca.

There are two points I think are valid in this (probably quite rare) situation:

1 - We cannot assume that because the traditional knowledge of whatever is fully documented in some honky anthropological journal that it is just as accessible to x indigenous culture as it was before. Knowledge of x indigenous language might provide a more comfortable/accessible sociolinguistic mechanism for the transfer of this stuff.

2 - "Human knowledge" particular to x indigenous culture is not static, but constantly being updated. If you're fond of any weakish versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis you might be inclined to think that engaging with indigenous traditions and belief systems within the radically different semantically (and grammatically?)-encoded Weltanschauung of x lingua franca as opposed to x indigenous language could be problematic. Then again, perhaps if it were so important, the language wouldn't die out in the first place?

Now I'm not saying this is necessarily the case, but I think language loss could be sufficient for loss of this "human knowledge". OTOH, people who are losing their traditional languages have a habit of borrowing loanwords for important cultural concepts into the language of their hegemonic linguistic overlords. And maybe the linguists do a great job of making the "human knowledge" available for the masses, or maybe not. Probably not.

I would actually say that the transposition of one language over another is more a feature of sociolinguistics, not a dissolution of knowledge. It is easy to become emotional about the loss of a unique and fascinating language, but to frame it as the complete loss of a set of "human knowledge" is a bit extreme IMO.

I actually met David Harrison a few years ago. He didn't seem like a moron or a total douchebag to me, whereas the BBC has a long history of douchebaggery and stupidity in its reporting on linguistic matters. I agree with Radius that the reasonable doubt should be with Harrison for now.

tlakan wrote:I would actually say that the transposition of one language over another is more a feature of sociolinguistics, not a dissolution of knowledge. It is easy to become emotional about the loss of a unique and fascinating language, but to frame it as the complete loss of a set of "human knowledge" is a bit extreme IMO.

I think it's probably partly an artifact of a linguist trying to answer a question about "why should people care about language death" in a simplistic enough way to satisfy a reporter who doesn't know anything about the subject. Although certainly some writers on language death do go as far as that quote, but still. You need to tell the reporter something that an average person might care about, and one such thing is the loss of cultural diversity.

Whimemsz wrote:You need to tell the reporter something that an average person might care about, and one such thing is the loss of cultural diversity.

A fair enough point. I guess I just prefer a bit less exacerbation in my linguistic related stories.

All right. Slight change of topic.

I got the article in a different paper, namely USA Today (somebody else showed me the article; I don't really like USA Today), but anyway, the article pretty much made it seem like a new language was being born out of nowhere, or somehow created, as the article basically said that this new discovery counteracted the steady dying of languages, which is true, but in this context, it made it seem like the language randomly appeared or something. And as for the "completely different" thing, while the language is probably a separate branch within Tibeto-Burman, it's not like it's an isolate or something. And the worst part is that this news was based on Ethnologue, which got its findings from a language survey published in 2005. So it's old news. Anyway, those reporters really need to do a better job of reporting the truth. I understand that they have to make the story interesting, but seriously.

This is a quote I heard somewhere, but I think it's really appropriate. "Asking a linguist how many languages they speak is like asking a doctor how many diseases they have."

Abugida wrote:All right. Slight change of topic.

I got the article in a different paper, namely USA Today (somebody else showed me the article; I don't really like USA Today), but anyway, the article pretty much made it seem like a new language was being born out of nowhere, or somehow created, as the article basically said that this new discovery counteracted the steady dying of languages, which is true, but in this context, it made it seem like the language randomly appeared or something. And as for the "completely different" thing, while the language is probably a separate branch within Tibeto-Burman, it's not like it's an isolate or something. And the worst part is that this news was based on Ethnologue, which got its findings from a language survey published in 2005. So it's old news. Anyway, those reporters really need to do a better job of reporting the truth. I understand that they have to make the story interesting, but seriously.

This is a quote I heard somewhere, but I think it's really appropriate. "Asking a linguist how many languages they speak is like asking a doctor how many diseases they have."

Spontaneous generation of languages would be pretty fun though.
Just to wake up and find that everyone in your town now speaks a new language.

Just to wake up and find that everyone in your town now speaks a new language.

Didn't we have a thread about what one would do if they suddenly found themselves suddenly transported back 1000 years? Some people resolved to live the life of an outlaw, while others to try to rise to positions of power with their knowledge of reading/writing/latin/etc.

Atom wrote:Spontaneous generation of languages would be pretty fun though.
Just to wake up and find that everyone in your town now speaks a new language.

I've had some story ideas along those lines -- a new psychedelic drug, or a genetically engineered plague, or a curse (in a fantasy setting) causes linguistic evolution to speed up greatly among the people affected; within a short time, those affected are speaking a distant descendant of the language they were speaking before, various affected communities' languages diverge as much in months as you would expect them to diverge in centuries, etc. I haven't figured out yet the way to make it work as a story, though. It seems as though you would have to develop several future-English conlangs [or descendants of whatever natlang you're writing the story in] and introduce them gradually in the course of the story, to represent the diverged languages of communities other than the viewpoint characters' -- while perhaps representing the viewpoint characters' own rapidly-evolved language as standard English, and the still-21st-century English of unaffected people as early modern (Jacobean, maybe) English? But that seems vaguely unsatisfying.

jimhenry wrote:I've had some story ideas along those lines -- a new psychedelic drug, or a genetically engineered plague, or a curse (in a fantasy setting) causes linguistic evolution to speed up greatly among the people affected; within a short time, those affected are speaking a distant descendant of the language they were speaking before

No matter what, in order for the changes to spread, communication is essential. If the drug would a) cause changes in speech and b) cause hightened awareness and immitation of other's speech changes, you still would need the people to be in close contact. Imagine that going into a shop, and when getting out all of a sudden you'd speek differently than before (and other's differently still).


JAL

For those who can read German, Anatol Stefanowitsch of Sprachlog has written a short article discussing Gizmodo's weird claims about the absolute alienness of Koro (which suffers heavily from Our Language Has No Word For It), also in order to show how scientific reports are twisted by the media.

Not sure if it has been linked, but I just found this:

http://video.nationalgeographic.com/vid ... o-vin.html